Social Networks Continue Push For Control

The Internet was supposed to facilitate direct connections between individuals and disempower gatekeepers. Instead, it has become a massive man-in-the-middle attack.

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Social networking shouldn't be compulsory, and yet it's becoming an obligation. The hunger among Internet companies for data about who you are, what you do, where you go, and who you know keeps growing. They want you to share so they can earn. So they have violated Communication Neutrality: They have made mechanisms for expression into vehicles for marketing, forcing those who participate in online life to promote.

Social networking has become inescapable. Startups often require a Facebook or Twitter login. Google now requires a Google+ account to post app reviews on Google Play. And in many lines of knowledge work, including journalism, participation in these networks has become a job requirement.

Or it would, if social networks were actually about sharing. The irony of the constant cajoling to share more, of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's self-serving predictions that everyone will share more in the future, is that social networks themselves limit how they share the data they've collected. They don't so much share as restrict, through contractual API limitations, through incomplete export capabilities, through burdensome processes, under the pretense of user protection, or to spite the competition.

Consider the latest dustup between Instagram and Twitter. According to the New York Times, Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom acknowledged that his Facebook-owned company has eliminated the ability to embed pictures in Twitter and intends to make posts to Twitter redirect users to Instagram to view images.

Share and share alike? Hardly. You promote, we monetize.

Social networking isn't about sharing. It's about marketing. Perhaps the most obvious proof of that is Facebook's promoted posts, through which advertisers can pay to have their marketing distributed more widely in Facebook users' news feeds.

Sharing at its best is private, personal and genuine. It's direct. It doesn't involve intermediaries. It doesn't have terms of service or privacy policies that describe how you will not be getting privacy. But public sharing is something else entirely. It's publishing, or something like it, paid for by free online services worth far less than the data surrendered and the labor required to produce it. But that's capitalism, isn't it? Buy low, sell high.

Publishing used to imply a separation between editorial and advertising. But these days, editorial and advertising are often blurred in a suspicious slurry. Our reflexive distrust of advertising has been disarmed because the norms of social networking make everything potentially commercial. If you're not promoting someone else's brand, you're promoting the brand that is you. To condemn marketing on the Internet is to be a hypocrite, because everyone's doing it or benefiting from it.

The problem with commercial communication is that it's something less than honest. It's antisocial because it calls trust into question. Social networking undermines the social contract. Marketing might be necessary but it shouldn't pervade every online interaction.

It might be easier to surrender social interaction to intermediaries, but there's no reason it has to be that way. The Internet was supposed to be the great disintermediator. It was supposed to facilitate direct connections between individuals and to disempower middlemen and gatekeepers. Instead, it has become a massive man-in-the-middle attack.

A criminal man-in-the-middle attack is covert and aims to steal important data. A social man-in-the-middle attack is merely obscure and aims to use important data, lawfully though seldom with informed consent and adequate disclosure.

In the years ahead, perhaps it will be different. Despite the underwhelming adoption of social network alternatives such as Diaspora and Tent.io, social networking could become more like WordPress, a service that users could run for themselves through a cloud computing service provider. You shouldn't need Facebook, Google, or Microsoft to share. That's what the Internet is for.

Your points are valid, but assume that social media should be provided as a free service with no strings attached. Want world class connectivity, uptime and networking for $0. Try doing this on a small scale on your own servers. - Social networks need to pay for infrastructure and their founders hope to make a profit. To expect them to provide a service which is free, transparent and open is naive and utopian.Of course, there ARE free social networks, such as many blog sites etc like the wordpress example you give.The downside is all your friends and family are somewhere else.There is no doubt that some networks (eg FB) have abused their trust and market share, and will pay the consequences, but some sort of paid model is going to deliver a better service for most users, yet no one wants to pay up front, so backend profits such as data mining are the most successful business model at present.

Appreciate your thoughts on social networking and privacy. So rare to hear anyone care to consider the deeper issues. Making such, not so obvious, yet egregious, privacy violations should not become standard as you point out in your article here, but has all to quickly become the case. Cloud computing will never secure ones data, not even with new 'secure' standards being proposed. Do you know what nation your clouds data center is physically located in? Are the privacy laws the same as in your home country? Will your data be misused when the company is acquired or sold? End users of cloud services don't know, and would not know, to consider such things! I shudder when I hear about school districts and government agencies utilizing cloud services such as Google Apps. Its about money for them, not your rights to privacy or whatever else concerns you.

Technology and privacy currently is much, much worse than we will ever know. We should be extremely concerned about technology and privacy issues.

I turned off my FB a couple years ago when I found out they never delete user data and all too frequent of changes to the FB TOS and\or AUP privacy\usage policies were very annoying. Back in 2001 I set up my own web and terminal server on my home network so I could access my data remotely, shortly after, my ISP began blocking it. Such censorship was not illegal until merely a few years ago or so, but the damage is done, I never set up the services I needed after they blocked me. I was forced into cloud services such as hotmail, google, etc. My ISPs were always happy to sell me sub-standard hosting services however.

The sad reality is all these services could easily be run on ones own system(s) within their own domicile, but that would take the money and control out of it for the cloud service providers and others involved. Your smartphone could download playlists and videos off your own home based cloud, as well as get email, or that file you need. Unfortunately, corporations and others want the most important and expensive component, even more information about you.

Yes, thought I would comment on an article once on MSNBC. Put in my credentials and got a prompt that indicated it would be automatically published to an additional 8 chat/blogs/services without an option to opt out of any of them. At least they had the good sense to include the cancel button or infamous X in the upper right corner.

This is highly insightful comment.I think of social networking as an expanded form of business communication, not to be confused with personal interaction or personal communication. At the same time I take a jaundiced view to how some companies are grabbing data from it and treating it as a basis for marketing. They know nothing and soon display that. The best social networking has a personal element in it and is revealing of the author. But it's a wise author who saves the truly personal for a more personal setting..Charlie Babcock, InformationWeek

Software as a service is the clear No. 1 way enterprises consume cloud. InformationWeek's SaaS Innovation Survey reveals three tips to get the most from SaaS: Make it a popularity contest. Have an escape plan. And remember that identity is the new perimeter.